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Zionism: Religious Zionism
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Zionism and Occupation - For many people in Israel and abroad, "Zionism" came to imply support for the settlement of Jews in the territories occupied by Israel in the 6-day war. It assumed a very negative connotation for those who oppose the occupation. The word "Zionism" in the sense of support for settlers is used both by right wing Zionist extremists, and by anti-Zionists. Right wing Zionist extremists insist that withdrawal from the occupied territories will mean the "end of Zionism." Anti-Zionists insist that "expansionism" is part of Zionist ideology. Historically, this view does not seem to have ideological support, since "Greater Israel" was the ideology of the breakaway religious movement created after 1967, and was never the ideology of mainstream Zionism except perhaps for a few decades following the Six Day war. Messianism was part of proto-Zionism, but the Zionist movement was pragmatic in all that it said and did.
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The emergence of modern political Zionism in the late nineteenth century did not inspire great enthusiasm on American shores. German American Jews, who numbered about 200,000 at the time Theodore Herzl convened the First Zionist Congress in 1897, rejected calls for creation of a Jewish state. Reared in the classical Reform movement, they considered the United States their "New Zion" and feared that Jewish nationalism might compromise their standing as loyal American citizens. At its 1885 Pittsburgh meeting, the Reform movement's Central Conference of American Rabbis declared, "We consider ourselves no longer a nation but a religious community and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine … nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state."
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Zionism has always been a part of Judaism - The ideological and cultural foundations of Zionism have always been present in Jewish tradition. Jews always thought of themselves as a nation or people. The concept of "[A]m Yisrael" - the "people of Israel" or "nation of Israel," has been inherent in Jewish culture from ancient times. Jewish cultural and religious life always centered around the land of Israel. This did not change during two millennia of dispersion.
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The second political upheaval -- that of 1992 -- brought the dominant Geulah school of thought in Religious Zionism to a point of severe crisis. The turnabout in Government policy -- especially the willingness to withdraw from parts of Eretz Yisrael -- was perceived (by those who saw Eretz Yisrael as the focal point of national renaissance) as proportional to "Churban" (Destruction). These policies were compared even to the Holocaust (proving a lack of minimal understanding of the Holocaust). Internal tensions rose to new heights and the history of Zionism became blurred. The orthodox supporters of the Geulah motif forgot, among other things, the territorial concessions and withdrawals which the leaders of the Zionist Movement and governments of the State of Israel had made in the past. (For example acceptance of the Peel Commission partition plan of 1937 and the withdrawals from territories occupied in the War for Independence in 1949 and the Sinai Campaign of 1956).
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The 1967 war between Israel and the Arab states (the "Six-Day War") marked a major turning point in the history of Israel and of Zionism. Israeli forces captured the eastern half of Jerusalem, including the holiest of Jewish religious sites, the Western Wall of the ancient Temple. They ... took over the remaining territories of pre-1948 Palestine, the West Bank (from Jordan) and the Gaza Strip (from Egypt). Religious Jews regarded the West Bank (ancient Judaea and Samaria) as an integral part of Eretz Israel, and within Israel voices of the political Right soon began to argue that these territories should be permanently retained. Zionist groups began to build Jewish settlements in the territories as a means of establishing "facts on the ground" that would make an Israeli withdrawal impossible.
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Zionism believes that Israel should be a Jewish state. This is a different issue from whether Israel has a right to exist, since not all Israelis are Jews. There is a significant minority of Arab Israelis, and there are Israelis of many other ethnic and religious groups as well.
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Religious Zionism